The Invisible Woman

by Claire Tomalin

  As Catherine Dickens whiled away empty days in Gloucester Crescent, Nelly settled into her new life less than a mile away. She had gained leisure and freedom, and with them another gift: invisibility. Her sisters’ names continued to appear in playbills and newspaper reports, and indeed from time to time in the letters of Dickens, who went on recommending their talents to producers; but not Nelly’s, who was suddenly nowhere and nothing. Even in the census for April 1861, although she was listed with the rest of her family (and two servants) at Houghton Place – Mrs Ternan was described as an ‘annuitant’, Fanny as ‘vocalist’, Maria as ‘actress’ – Nelly alone went without any description beyond her age, correctly given as twenty-two.

  What was she doing, beyond the process of self-education described by Katey? Francesco Berger recalled, as an old man, that he had spent pleasant evenings at her house, when she and Dickens sang duets together to his accompaniment, and there were card games: something that suggests a certain stability of routine, a relaxed atmosphere, an acceptance both by Mrs Ternan and a circle of trusted friends that Dickens had his place in the household.25 She continued to read his proofs and he to ‘set great store by’ her ‘intuitive sense and discretion’.26 Another glimpse: this may have been the period at which Dickens took his real Nelly to see where he had imagined the home of her namesake Little Nell, in the original Curiosity Shop, then still a flourishing enterprise, behind the National Gallery at the corner of Green and Castle streets. He pointed out the bedroom where he had imagined Little Nell sleeping behind a glass partition. It was the sort of outing he would relish; we know of it only because a lady ‘personally acquainted with the great novelist’, but unwilling to give her name, gave ‘positive assurance that it was so’ many years later.27

  Inevitably it is through Dickens that Nelly’s story has to be traced during these hidden years; but it is precisely at this point that his own record also grows more obscure. In September 1860, having at last got rid of Tavistock House, he made a great bonfire of all his correspondence; at the same time he asked his friends to destroy his letters to them. Many did as he asked. It was a harder task for a famous man to disappear from view than for a girl; but he had perfected a way of life which allowed him freedom to come and go as he chose, always living in more than one place, and sometimes with three or even four semi-permanent addresses, quite apart from his reading tours and working trips.† It meant that he could be inaccessible and virtually invisible whenever he wished.

  Very little social life is recorded, though he still dined respectably at Forster’s from time to time and, less respectably, called on Collins, Caroline and ‘the Butler’, as he chose to call her daughter Harriet. When he was at Wellington Street – for instance during a spell in the winter of 1860 – he went to the theatre almost every night: in September 1860 he was at a first night of Maria’s at the Lyceum, and on Boxing night the same year he was at the Covent Garden pantomime.28 Some of these were solitary visits; Wills and Collins were occasional companions; and it would be surprising if Nelly had not also sometimes been at his side, a shadowy figure in a box.

  In April 1861 Miss Coutts made another attempt to reconcile him with Catherine, with no greater success. In the same month he heard of the widowed Macready’s remarriage, at the age of sixty-seven, to one of his daughter’s friends, Cecile, a young woman more than thirty years his junior.29 It must have been hard not to envy him, and hard for Nelly not to reflect on the chances of life. When Dickens visited the Macreadys the following January, he found Cecile delightful. She was just the sort of diminutive and vivacious young woman he appreciated. She was also pregnant; and a few months later she gave Macready a healthy baby son.

  Throughout this winter and spring Dickens was writing Great Expectations, and in May he went off to Dover to work on it, alone. It is his saddest book, clearly marked with pain and with the acknowledgement that mistakes can be irrevocable, despite the ‘happy ending’ counselled by his friend Bulwer-Lytton. It is also the most sustainedly beautiful piece of writing he ever produced. Out of anxiety and guilt came a masterpiece cast in an unfamiliar mould, subtle and haunting, and with a new note of self-questioning and self-knowledge. At the centre, instead of an innocent child – a Nell, a David, an Esther, an Amy Dorrit – he put a thoroughly corruptible boy. Pip is snobbish, ambitious and treacherous; he deludes himself about his own and other people’s motives, is chastened and punished, and reaches no real fulfilment. Instead of an angelic, fluttering doll – a Dolly, a Dora, an Ada, a Lucie – he is partnered with Estella, who is quick, clever and undomesticated, an icy beauty plucked from the underworld and trained to trust nothing but money and to wreak vengeance against the false male sex.

  Edmund Wilson is not the only commentator to suggest that the frigid and mercenary aspects of Estella may have been drawn from Nelly, or to assert that ‘we know something about what Dickens thought of her from the heroines in his last books who are derived from her’; and that there is something confessional about Pip’s declaration that he loves her ‘against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be’.30 Perhaps we should believe that Nelly kept Dickens dangling while she extracted financial tribute from him; that she exulted in making him suffer and succumbed to his embraces only reluctantly in the end. Mrs Ternan makes an unconvincing Miss Havisham, but that’s not the only reason for questioning this version. From what we know of the Ternans, of Nelly herself and the whole situation, it is at least as likely that she was nervous, confused and uncertain as that she was indifferent or frigid. She was, in Katey’s words, elated by Dickens’s attentions; he had appeared in her life as a benefactor who would give her the chance of bettering herself: a kind, good man. And so he was; only, confusingly, the kind, good Dickens was mixed with the man who wanted to ruin her; as Steerforth ruined Little Em’ly. Dickens had written his own condemnation too often to expect to have it easily forgotten. Inimitable, irresistible, as loving as a boy he might be; all the same, the aspirations of Nelly and the aspirations of Dickens cross like lines on a graph at this point. Where he was eager for release from the conventions and hypocrisies of British middle-class society, she wanted to leave behind the equivocal world of the theatre in which she had been reared and become respectable. It puts Dickens in a painful dilemma; for by the time he realized she was not quite the sort of young woman he had imagined at first – that the dream of sexual bliss promised by a little actress was as delusive as the dream of domestic bliss promised by a wife – it was too late. He was caught. He may well have hesitated to urge her into a step whose dangers he understood, but he still yearned for her. What he had to do was to reassure her that he would never allow her to suffer as he had seen other young women suffer. The one sure protection he could offer was to make her financially secure.

  There is no reason to think she was not responsive to his charm, which dazzled so many young women, or grateful for his devotion. Indeed, it’s perfectly possible she was in love with him. The duets in the drawing room at Houghton Place, the heads together over proofs, the walks and talks about London and Hampstead Heath, all carry their own suggestion of warmth and intimacy. In the late twentieth century it’s easy to forget that people could be deeply in love and still struggle to maintain chaste relations, often for years, for reasons of morality, as well as terror of the consequences. Nelly may have hoped that a solution would appear, and that they would be able to marry; even if divorce, resorted to by his brother, was unthinkable for Dickens himself, Catherine might die, as Kitty Macready had. But no such solution presented itself.

  Macready, who once said it was almost impossible for a young woman working in the theatre to remain virtuous, is supposed to have taken ‘the Ellen Ternan affair, etc., calmly – as Dickens was not the celibate type’.31 If so, his attitude suggests that he accepted the licence of the theatrical world readily enough in private, even when it concerned a girl he had known from childhood; he was more concerned that
Dickens should not risk public scandal. No doubt he believed that, at the sensitive point where the theatre met the outside world, hypocrisy became not only excusable but absolutely necessary.

  After the completion of Great Expectations in June 1861, Dickens did not embark on another novel for two and a half years; this is sometimes attributed to his putting his energy into public readings and earning more by these than by writing. However, between January 1862 and April 1866 he did no public readings, except for a few in Paris in the winter of 1863. For a man of fifty the change of pace in his working life is marked enough to point to a major personal upheaval. Collins could take a mistress lightly enough – he could take two, still lightly – but Dickens was cut to a different pattern; besides, he had not found Nelly in the street, like Caroline Graves, or serving at table in a country inn, as Wilkie found Martha, his second. As far as we know Dickens did not introduce Nelly to Wilkie’s women, let alone take her along to participate in those unbuttoned evenings chez Caroline. Later he wrote that his ‘magic circle’ consisted of one member only. She was one whose dignity increasingly demanded the protection of isolation and silence.

  In June 1862 Dickens sent a plea to Forster, asking him to understand his character over the past five years – the years since he had met Nelly – by referring to his childhood unhappinesses. ‘The never to be forgotten misery of that old time, bred a certain shrinking sensitiveness in a certain ill-clad, ill-fed child, that I have found come back in the never to be forgotten misery of this later time.’32 This is a key confession. Dickens’s childhood misery was like a sacred totem, a secret source of power from which he drew, and Forster was one of the very few who knew of it, and who could therefore understand the strength of what was being said now. Those early sufferings were caused by his parents’ – and particularly his mother’s – failure to cherish him and see his true worth during a time of trial; they were the spur to the enormous act of will that made him great. If he was now again faced with a situation which produced an all-encompassing misery, a ‘shrinking sensitiveness’, an equivalent cause has to be discovered.

  It began partly, no doubt, in the fear of losing the love of his public, which some believe meant more to him always than any woman. Yet the scandal of the separation was now four years behind him, his children were loyal – even Charley became reconciled – and his public had not turned against him; his reputation stood as high as ever. Still he was not delivered from misery. Any displays of capriciousness from Nelly, who had now after all given up any attempt to lead a self-sufficient life, simply do not seem enough to explain his depth of unhappiness. Guilt, on the other hand, does. The unhappiness of the woman he loved, caused by shame or fear, does. Nelly was evidently not someone who could be used lightly and easily, but a proud and sensitive girl. The more he loved her, the more painful must have been the knowledge that his love might be responsible for making her submit to difficulty and disgrace. Further: if she became his mistress, every time he took her in his arms, he would be inflicting on her the fear of becoming pregnant with a child which would shame her, and which could never be openly acknowledged by its father; a child which must carry the worst stigma society could inflict on shoulders as innocent as those of little David, little Pip, little Esther – or little Charles himself. Such a dilemma – such a prospect – might well prompt a misery ‘never to be forgotten’ in this later time of his life.

  One other sighting of Dickens at this time. In the bitter winter of 1861, walking near Gloucester Gate in Regent’s Park late one afternoon, as the darkness thickened and the air began to freeze, he passed the lodge and heard the driver of a hansom cab asking for a pole. Provided with one, the man set off, followed by a curious Dickens, for the bridge over the canal, where the park-keeper and a policeman were looking over the parapet:

  Looking over too, I saw, lying on the towing-path with her face turned up towards us, a woman, dead a day or two, and under thirty, as I guessed, poorly dressed in black. The feet were lightly crossed at the ankles, and the dark hair, all pushed back from the face, as though that had been the last action of her desperate hands, streamed over the ground.

  As they stood there, a barge came up the canal, steered by a woman; the horse on the towing path got his hoofs into the dead woman’s hair, and the tow-rope threatened to catch and twist her head. There was a general cry of horror,

  at which sound the steering woman looked up at us on the bridge, with contempt unutterable, and then looked down at the body with a similar expression – as if it were made in another likeness from herself, had been informed with other passions, had been lost by other chances, had had another nature dragged down to perdition – steered a spurning streak of mud at it, and passed on.33

  It’s the contempt of one woman for another, the way the living woman dissociates herself from the dead victim, as though she could have nothing in common with her, which makes Dickens wince. The canal suicide quite naturally led him to recall that other incident of twenty-five years earlier, when he had served on the jury at a trial of a girl accused either of concealing the birth of her baby – which had died – or of infanticide. He noted that she was a servant, maid-of-all-work to a cruelly virtuous mistress who testified against her, and whose cold wet doorsteps she had scrubbed immediately after giving birth to the child. The Dickens who reports these two cases is sparing with the rhetoric and unsentimental, as though he feels no need to drum up feelings about such bleak but common London tragedies. A young woman, dead or alive; a baby, dead or alive; a policeman, or a court of law; the contempt of the virtuous: all delivered the same message.

  * This corner building is still standing. There is now a shop on the ground floor, and a blue plaque commemorates Dickens’s years there.

  † For example, early in 1861 he had a rented house in Hanover Terrace, Regent’s Park, Gad’s Hill and his flat in Wellington Street; in 1866 he still had Gad’s Hill and Wellington Street, plus a rented house in Somers Place, Hyde Park, and a cottage (probably two cottages) in Slough.

  9

  Vanishing into Space

  1862–1865

  Nelly now disappears from view completely, conjured into thin air. For four years she remains invisible. Her name does not figure in any surviving letters. She and her mother are not even at Maria’s London wedding in June 1863: a striking absence in a small, mutually devoted family. She has become a perfect blank.

  When she reappears in the summer of 1865, she is travelling in a private first-class carriage in a ‘tidal train’, part of the rapid service between Paris and London. She is beautifully dressed, wearing a gold watch and trinkets, and is sitting next to Dickens and opposite an elderly lady, almost certainly her mother. They are accompanied by luggage, including several hatboxes. She is by now an excellent French speaker; her hair is darker and no longer arranged in curls; she is thinner, more elegant, a little hollow-cheeked. She is coming from abroad; but how long she has been abroad and where exactly remain conjectural.

  At a guess, she has been living in France. It is only a guess. This is to be a chapter of guesses and conjectures, and those who don’t like them are warned. No one has come up with any proof of her residence in or near Boulogne, or Paris, or anywhere else on the Continent. Arrivals and departures were not recorded by the boat companies or at the Channel ports. She herself never referred to this period of her life but abolished it altogether; though the fact that she chose to go to Paris, where she appears to have had friends, in the aftermath of Dickens’s death, could indicate that she had lived there earlier. If she was in England between 1862 and 1865, it leaves unanswered questions about her absence from Maria’s wedding and about Dickens’s ‘perpetual’ (his own word) cross-Channel trips during these years. He had already sent one Ternan sister first to Italy and then to Paris; if Fanny could go, Nelly could follow, though the reasons might be rather different. There is no doubt that he was intensely involved, or in love, with her in 1862, when she disappeared from view, and still so involved in
1865, when she – inadvertently – reappeared; or that, after finishing Great Expectations in the summer of 1861, he remained singularly idle and unproductive, giving very few readings or public speeches and writing very little until he started on a new novel in the autumn of 1863. Something was happening during those carefully blotted out years; and it was happening somewhere discreetly distanced from prying eyes.

  Dickens knew France and was enchanted by most aspects of the French way of life from his first encounter with it when he was in his thirties; he pronounced Paris ‘the most extraordinary place in the World’. He took his wife and children across the Channel many times, enjoyed whole summers at Boulogne, sent his sons to school there, and made jaunts with bachelor friends. He became lyrical in praise of the speed at which the South-Eastern railway could transport him to Paris, comparing it to an Arabian Nights excursion: